Paris at Night, Patti Smith on "Love on the Left Bank"

There is some delicious stuff on Vanity Fair online this week. First, someone pointed an online group I am part of in the direction of these marvelous nighttime Paris photographs, mostly from the 1920's and '30's.




Brassaï, La Casque de Cuir, 1932. From vanityfair.com

 

Robert Doisneau, The Stairway, 1952. From vanityfair.com

 

The full set is available here.




As lovely as the nighttime photos are, it was this feature that really got my attention. A 1954 photo-novel called Love on the Left Bank by photographer Ed van der Elsken’s has just been reissued. There are some amazing photos from the book on the web site, with this intro from the tremendous Patti Smith:

 I opened it and was greeted by a dark and intriguing café scene on the grittier side of the City of Light. It was Jack Kerouac, Parisian-style. I was especially captivated by the image of a girl, the likes of whom I had never seen before. She was Vali Myers, the Beatnik gypsy mystical witch who reigned over the rain-soaked streets. With her wild hair, kohl-rimmed eyes, loose raincoat, and cigarette, she offered herself with abandon and self-containment. She mirrored what I aspired to aesthetically—to be unconscious of style, yet style itself.

Below, some shots from this book that I must get my hands on this very instant.



all images from vanityfair.com



(Seriously, where has this perfect-for-me book been all my life, and why am I just hearing about it now?) The full set is here, with more information about Patti Smith here, and more about Vali Myers here. 

More from Inès and a Beauty Tip from Me

I may have underestimated this book. I've picked it up again this afternoon and I'm enjoying the sound advice.

I have many, many skincare clients who come in to tell my how hideous their skin is when they look at it in the magnifying mirror. That's when I give them

Argentée's Number One Rule for Beauty:

Take your magnifying mirror and give it to someone you don't like.

Similarly, Inès de la Fressange has this to say about Botox: "I pay no attention to wrinkles. I just stand back from the mirror."

Refreshing and delightful! Yes, beauty is fun and socially useful, but shouldn't we have better things to do than obsess in the mirror if all we are doing is looking for reasons to not adore what we see?

Inès writes, "My absolute role model is singer Julio Iglesias. Asked if he was afraid of getting old, he replied, 'But I'm already old.'" The Parisian is more worried about wrinkles at 20 than at 50."

I always tell my skincare clients (many of whom are gorgeous 20-somethings who are terrified of age) that I have no desire for "anti-aging." I mean, not when you consider the alternative! I'm pro-aging. I hope to age a very long time. But we can fight it and dread it and Botox it, or we can maintain our passions and our hobbies and age beautifully, with grace and health. Isn't that what we're striving for? My hope is that with age comes with the wisdom to not fear it.

Pas Laide

I'm not as in love with Johnny Depp as seemingly everyone else of my gender but I think he's a better actor than he should be. Conversely, I'm hardly a fan of Angelina Jolie but I admit to being simply awed by her beauty. And I'm not one to turn down breathtaking scenes shot in Venice and Paris. So my plans for tonight after kiddo's bedtime involve hanging out in my pjs with The Tourist.

Below, some images that send my costume and styling envy into overdrive.

And here, a little makeup tutorial that looks like a lot of fun for later tonight. (Right now I am rereading Mikhail Bulgokov's The Master and Margarita. It is an incredible piece of literature but when the opportunity to act single for a night appears, sometimes I just want to girl out.)

Balance in Everything

The husband is out of town for a bachelor party weekend that would depress me and annoy me if I thought too much about it. Yesterday I spent a lovely afternoon with two gorgeous girlfriends; one is a teacher on spring break and the other is a lucky lady of leisure. We had lunch and spent hours laughing and talking. There were cocktails and tarot cards, and if either of those things are to be believed the future looks excellent for all of us.

After school was out, my son and I came home to some relaxing and household tasks before heading out for a special evening together. I wrote last week about saying no to ice cream. Tonight was a break from my usual paleoh-la-la. I had a sweet dinner with my kid, followed by yes to ice cream, followed by a trip to the book store.

When we arrived there was a reading in progress by a journalist who has documented the history of Burning Man and its current transitioning from for-profit company to non-profit entity. The reading itself was fascinating enough but what struck me about the evening was the odd convergence of parts of my life: me in the children's section, reading Curious George on the one hand and, on the other, half listening to this journalist relay the story of the politics affecting this sometimes cooler-than-thou scene I've not been a part of in a long time. We ran into our neighbors there. They are also parents (as is everyone on this island, it seems) and also former burners. And while I won't likely go back to the Gerlach desert for large-scale art and dancing all night (at least not for a very long time), it was nice to be there and to feel a small part of the intersection between family and culture, just by virtue of participating in discussion at the reading.

As I was falling asleep I was thinking that I don't feel a conflict between being a woman and a mother. But I do believe that negotiating that balance takes work. Salad and ice cream, Curious George and Burning Man. Balance, balance in everything.

On Jolie Laide



While looking for the lyrics to the Serge Gainsbourg song whose lyric lent the title of this blog, I came across an exceptional NYT piece by Daphne Merkin. It was published in 2005 and you can read the full text here.

. . .there have always been those who question the dictates of conventional beauty, whose views of what constitutes a ravishing face range further than either the classical ideal or the ordained images of the cultural moment and who see our reverence for certain types over others as a form of aesthetic provincialism. . . (One) was my Belgian-born grandmother, who looked irritated whenever I, an insecure girl loitering on the edges of adolescence, asked her whether she thought I was pretty. "Pretty?" she'd ask. "Who wants to be pretty?" Her blazing blue eyes lit up her wrinkled face with the preposterousness of the wish. "Pretty is silly." I later discovered that no less an authority than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who studied the laws of female comeliness the way others study the laws of physics, agreed with my grandmother regarding the inherent banality of the merely pretty: "After a certain degree of prettiness," he wrote, "one pretty girl is as pretty as another."

I think Proust put it well too. He wrote, "Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination."

Parisian Chic: A Style Guide by Inès de la Fressange

The blogosphere is abuzz with talk about this cute little new style guide from professional gorgeous person Inès de la Fressange. I picked it up at my local bookstore (for nearly double the price it would have been on Amazon, aye-yee.) I'm not completely wowed by the book but it is entertaining enough. Parisian Chic is full of odd little illustrations and some surprising style advice. I've yet to work my way all the way through but following are some random bits and first impressions:

•  General style rules include a Magnificent Seven list of wardrobe must-haves that is a bit different from most. Included are a man's blazer, navy cashmere sweater, perfect jeans.
• Fun advice about what to wear for such events as an art opening, a black tie event, a country weekend and a first date.
• "For me, a loss of interest in dressing well and wearing make-up is a form of depression."
• The tuxedo jacket gets a lot of mention in this book. So do leather jackets.  I like to wear my tuxedo jacket for the odd informal-formal occasion, but I doubt Inès had tails in mind when she wrote her rules.
•  Inès recommends dressing your kid all in black. Accessorize with a bright scarf or coat. Cute!
• I wish there were photos of Inès herself in the book! She is lovely, and while the book features her beautiful daughter as model, it would have been inspiring to see this gorgeous femme d'un certain age gracing its pages.

The second half of the book is filled with Inès' Paris address book, with recommendations of where to shop, sleep, eat. Being the kind of woman whose Y chromosome somehow missed the shopping imprint, much of the content of these pages was a bit lost on me. But the photography is lovely and the overall impression is creatively inspiring and lush.

The best piece of advice in the book begins this way: "The Parisian never worships fashion idols. She is a fashion icon in her own right. . ."

Read more about Inès de la Fressange on Parisian Chic in this article, in which she says:

'French women don't want to be trendy. They know what suits them. It's more about style than trends. Women should dress up for themselves, not for showing off but to feel better - and if you feel better, you look better.'

Hear, hear.

Conflict: The Woman and the Mother

This summer will come the English translation of Elisabeth Badlinter's Conflict: The Woman and the Mother, a bestseller in France since its publication last year. The book is described this way:


Elisabeth Badinter has for decades been in the vanguard of the European fight for women's equality. Now, in an explosive new book, she points her finger at a most unlikely force undermining the status of women: liberal motherhood, in thrall to all that is "natural." Attachment parenting, co-sleeping, baby-wearing, and especially breast-feeding—these hallmarks of contemporary motherhood have succeeded in tethering women to the home and family to an extent not seen since the 1950s. Badinter argues that the taboos now surrounding epidurals, formula, disposable diapers, cribs—and anything that distracts a mother's attention from her offspring—have turned childrearing into a singularly regressive force.

A bestseller in Europe, The Conflict is a scathing indictment of a stealthy zealotry that cheats women of their full potential. 

I will agree that having a baby tethered me to my family. That's kind of what having a baby does, no? It's true I can no longer comfortably work 11-hour days six days a week. Nor can I jet to New York, meet friends for frequent cocktails, or take all the night classes I want to take without hiring someone to see my kid more than I do. And that was my choice. I chose to give birth and restructure my life and my priorities to care for the offspring I chose to create. Is that regressive? I don't think so. Did it rob me of my full potential? No - I offered that willingly. Life is about choices and compromise. And while I'd be lying if I said I always like it, I can at least acknowledge that it happened of my own volition and that the benefits, for me, outweigh the frustrations. Should that change, I might change how I choose to parent. For now it works. For me.

I support any woman's right to choose whatever works for her and I'm not at all keen to jump into the fray. But as for "taboos" surrounding epidurals, Ms. Badinter ought to check out the excellent, evidence-based work of Michel Odent (on whom I admit I have a bit of a crush).

Incidentally, a NYT review of Badinter's book quoted one one mother who says much more succinctly what I tried to about feminism and capitalism in my last post:


Amandine Panhard, 29. . . thinks the Badinter thesis is a false one. “It’s not about disposable diapers or plastic baby bottles but each woman’s personal development, financial independence and the relations between husband and wife,” she said. “The real conflict is not between the woman and the mother, but between the woman and the company.”